Sara froze for two more seconds, then yelled, “Hurry!” She ran toward Michael, scooped him up under the arms, and shoved him at Alex—who whirled and dashed up to the next door, which was sliding by at an alarming rate, and deposited Michael on the steel platform. Sara ran fast on his heels, breathless with exertion and excitement. Alex grabbed her arm and half-lifted, half-hurled her up behind Michael. Racing now, because in four more strides there wouldn’t be any platform left, he leapt for the high step, just as Sara and Michael made a grab for his coat and yanked.
He made it. No one spoke. All they could do was stare at each other in amazed disbelief while the train sped faster and faster, whistle screaming, and snow swirled past like furious white bees.
The forward inner door slid open and a uniformed porter faced them in the threshold. The surprise on his big, friendly face mirrored the same emotion in theirs. “How do? You folks got tickets tonight?”
“Uh oh. Oh no, oh no,” fretted Michael, clutching Sara’s sleeve, fearing the worst. It was easy to see whose child he was, she thought ruefully. “Have we got any money, Mum? Maybe Alex could lend us—”
“I’ve got money,” she assured him, laughing.
“We got plenty of seats, and still plenty of compartments in the sleeping car,” the porter said helpfully. “Not many folks traveling tonight. Where y’all going?”
“California,” Michael answered importantly.
“By way of Chicago,” Sara explained.
“Where we’re getting married,” Alex elucidated.
Sara felt herself blushing. “We’ll see.”
“She always means yes when she says ‘we’ll see,’ ” Michael confided to Alex in a conspirator’s voice.
“I’ll remember that.”
The porter’s face split from ear to ear with a white-toothed grin. “Well, ain’t this somethin’? Y’all ain’t even got any baggage, have you?” Sara and Michael shook their heads.
“Well, that’s not true,” Alex corrected. “We happen to be traveling with one of the finest examples of a pointed horseshoe arch I’ve ever seen.” Michael giggled, pinkening with pride. Alex reached into his pocket and handed something to the porter. “Would you mind helping the young man to a seat near mine? And after that, maybe you could find a sleeping compartment for mother and son—not too far away from mine, either.” He didn’t wink, but he wanted to.
“Yes, suh. You just leave all that to me. My name’s Lewis, and I’ll be takin’ care of y’all on this trip.” He eyed Michael benignly. “Need a hand with that?” The swaying of the train made it difficult for Michael to walk with his arch in his arms; he relinquished it to Lewis carefully, then preceded him through the sliding door.
Following him down the aisle, Lewis started to chuckle. Michael looked back. “I know they just want to kiss,” he said with quelling matter-of-factness, and the porter’s wide eyes widened further.
On the platform, Alex draped Sara’s arms around his neck and pulled her closer, bracing his back against the fire door for stability. Snow reeled and eddied around them and a freezing wind howled, but they were warm against each other. “Is he right?” Alex asked. “Does ‘we’ll see’ mean yes?” Before she could answer, he kissed her.
She sighed with her eyes closed. “Mm. Usually, yes. Not in this case, though, I don’t think.”
“Oh God, Sara,” he groaned, “don’t say that.” He kissed her again, deeply, and again, until they were both breathing hard. He pulled away to see if he was getting anywhere. “Come on,” he coaxed. “Marry me in Chicago. We’ll find a justice of the peace, some sentimental soul who won’t mind being rousted out on Christmas night. Michael can be ring bearer.”
She smiled dreamily and shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”
Alex frowned. “Reconsider,” he advised, running his tongue along the fragile inner surface of her lips. She caught her breath when he nibbled her top lip between his, then tickled the roof of her mouth with his tongue.
“Unh,” she breathed softly, deep in her throat, while his hand snaked inside her unbuttoned coat and stroked her stomach in possessive little circles. “Alex,” she tried to say, but he kissed her again, and his mouth was a ruthless silencer.
He slipped his other hand in and cupped her bottom through her gown, pulling her up tight against him. He groaned again, not sure which of them he was torturing now. “I love you, Sara. Marry me,” he mumbled, lips sliding wetly from her mouth to her ear, her throat. “Marry me in Chicago.”
“No. Can’t.”
He ground his teeth. “Why?”
She put her hands on his hard chest and pushed back. “Because,” she explained, breathless, “I’ll never hold out that long. Alex, you’ve got to marry me in Pittsburgh.”
His face stayed blank for the length of a second, and then he shouted out a loud, joyous laugh, hugging her ferociously.
They kissed. Kissed again. When his hands slipped naturally to her breasts she moaned, leaning into him heavily. “Possibly Philadelphia,” she got out faintly, clutching his shoulders.
“They ’bout to serve dinner in the dining car, you folks feel like eatin’. The little boy ’lowed as how he was startin’ to get hungry.”
They jumped apart, pivoting to see the porter behind them—how had he opened the door so soundlessly?—and pointedly looking away at the flying countryside. Sara discovered she was holding her hat in her hand, and busied herself putting it back on. Alex cleared his throat, running his hands over his disheveled hair and combing his damp mustache with his fingers. They gave each other surreptitious once-overs, then discreet nods that said they looked all right, everything considered, and followed Lewis into the lounge car. Michael waved when he saw them; they waved back. Sara turned her head to the side and said through her teeth, “I hope you tipped Lewis generously.”
“Why?”
“He saved us.”
“From what?”
“A wedding in Newark.”
Alex was still chuckling when they sat down, Michael wedged between them on the crack separating their seats. There was an empty seat for him across the aisle, but they weren’t ready to be separated yet.
“This is so neat,” he declared, one hand on Alex’s knee, one on his mother’s. They nodded in agreement.
All three turned to gaze out the window. Twinkling lights floated by in the snowy distance, but in the foreground all they could see was themselves, smiling at each other in the shining black mirror. They looked like a family.
A Biography of Patricia Gaffney
Patricia Gaffney is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of twelve historical romances and five contemporary women’s fiction titles. She has won the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart award and has been nominated six times for the RWA’s RITA award for excellence in romance writing.
Born on December 17, 1944, in Tampa, Florida, to an Irish Catholic family, Gaffney grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. After graduating from college, she worked as a high school teacher for one year before beginning a fifteen-year career as a freelance court reporter. It was during this time that she met her husband, Jon Pearson.
Gaffney’s life changed course in 1984 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her battle with the disease prompted her, in 1986, to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. Her first novel, Sweet Treason (1989), won a 1988 Golden Heart Award and the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice award for First Historical Romance. Her second novel, Fortune’s Lady (1989), which is set in England against the backdrop of the French Revolution, was shortlisted for the RITA. She followed her early success with Another Eden (1992), Crooked Hearts (1994), Sweet Everlasting (1994), Lily (1996), Outlaw in Paradise (1997), and Wild at Heart (1997), the latter of which was among ten finalists for RWA’s reader-nominated Favorite Book of the Year Award.
Since the late nineties, Gaffney has found added success writing women’s fiction. Her novels The Saving Graces (1999), Circle of Three (2000), Flight Lessons (2002), and The G
oodbye Summer (2004) all appeared on several national bestseller lists. The Saving Graces was on the New York Times bestseller list for seventeen weeks.
With her friends Nora Roberts (writing as J. D. Robb), Mary Blayney, and others, Gaffney has also contributed novellas to three anthologies, all of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Gaffney lives with her husband and two dogs in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.
Gaffney at age three.
Gaffney celebrating her twenty-first birthday in Vienna, Austria, during her junior year studying abroad.
Gaffney attended graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s pictured here during what she refers to as her “hippie days” in the early 1970s.
Gaffney and her husband Jon Pearson, high on love.
Class photo from East Mecklenberg High School in Charlotte, NC, where Gaffney taught twelfth-grade English for a year.
Romance Writers of America Winner’s Ribbon from the 1988 conference in Seattle.
At Nora Roberts’s house in the early 1990s. Left to right: Nora Roberts, Mary Blayney, Christine Dorsey, Elaine Fox, Gaffney, Beth Harbison, and Mary Kay McComas.
Example of a first draft, always done longhand.
A final outline for Mad Dash.
The Gaffney clan in 1989. From left: Mike (brother), mother, father, Pat.
Gaffney and Jon with their dog Hannah in 2000.
Gaffney with Jon and dogs Jolene (left) and Finney (right) in 2007.
Gaffney’s office in the attic.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1992 by Patricia Gaffney
cover design by Connie Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
A Biography of Patricia Gaffney
Copyright
EBOOKS BY PATRICIA GAFFNEY
Videos, Archival Documents, and New
Another Eden Page 32